To jazz up your ability to
innovate, turn to jazz – create a clear guiding structure,
establish a creative chaos environment within this structure to
liberate people and trigger accidental discoveries, and
encourage improvisation.

There is a clear structure to good
jazz. Similarly, the flexible improvisation-driven model for
innovation project management encourages improvisation within a
guiding structure. In innovation, this structure is created
through roadmaps, guiding principles, business processes,
systems and organizational charts. Strategic-planning and
road-mapping processes cannot guarantee brilliant flashes of
creative insight, but they can prepare minds and increase the
odds that such flashes occur in real time. Thus structure, as
chords do in jazz, serves as a basis for improvisation,
experimentations, discoveries and innovation.

The "Inherent
Sloppiness" of Innovation

Tom Peters researched many
innovative companies and had been impressed in his researches by
the "inherent sloppiness" of innovation. The "messy world", or
the "creative chaos environment", is its "given precondition".
The necessary solution has three parts, each one leading on to
the next: experimentation, champions, and decentralized bands.
To take advantage of that “inherent sloppiness” of innovation,
managers must generate the right climate for creativity,
experimentation, and individualism, and encourage iconoclasts
and rule-breakers.

Case in Point:
IDEO – Designed Chaos and Hands-Off Management

Fast Company magazine calls IDEO
"the world's most celebrated design firm.“ When David Kelley
began IDEO, he was determined to forego the structural demands
of big corporations and refused to install a management
hierarchy. His first order of business was to create an
environment in which his workers would be happy and free to
think creatively. Mostly, Kelley's style is hands-off, allowing
employees to become their own bosses. At IDEO, there is no
corporate hierarchy and no management structure. Employees are
invited, not ordered, to attend meetings, and can also decide
where they want to work and can tell the CEO what they really
think of his ideas. Out of this chaos have come products that
have made a deep impact on society. (Virtual Advisor Inc.)